FROM POWERPOINT TO PUBLISHABLE

Scientific figures don’t have to be ugly. When I design for scientists, I ask questions until I’ve isolated the ONE message that a reader should grasp from each figure. This could be a route, pattern, trend, process, difference, or distribution. Whatever the message, everything else—every other line, point, shape, color, or label—I try to make secondary. If it’s not helping, it’s hurting.

For example: At the start of my collaboration with David, he sent me a slide featuring an image of cells, chromosomes, and DNA (above, left). The extra labels, realistic shading, and twisting dimensionality muddied its message. What a reader needed to see was that life’s building blocks are a set of nesting parts, so I flattened the anatomy into a step-by-step schematic (above, right).

Oliver was obsessive about getting every last detail right and making sure that every figure was a masterpiece of scientific communication.

— David Reich, Professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School

CLARITY WITHOUt COLORs

This book, like most trade nonfiction, was printed with only black ink. At first, that can seem like a terrible limitation. However, grayscale is actually a helpful test for decluttering figures. Because there are no colors to hide behind, you’re forced to be more aware of what each shade signifies and more selective in what information you include.

PACKAGING

When I work on a book, I want it to sell. So I pitched a few ideas for David’s cover: stripes to evoke DNA, optical mixture to represent genetic mixture. Pantheon, the US publisher, selected the design on the left. Oxford University Press went for a variation of the middle option. While I like them all, I still love the intermixing colors on the right. Perhaps a paperback, Pantheon?

My favorite detail in designing books is choosing the endbands (below). At that stage, I’m thinking solely about a reader’s delight in discovering and holding a new book.